Customer Reviews

The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management

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Confused about WSDL, SOX or DML? Not only does the DAMA Dictionary of Data Management give you the key to unlocking hundreds of acronyms, it will also give you the definition for them. Great for figuring out what they meant in those presentations where they used all those 3-letter abbreviations designed to confuse the rest of us.

Just received this and it is okay but $44 seems like a lot to pay for a PDF file. The first link I tried to reach via this book [...] was no longer working so that did not create a great impression either.

Also this disk should be shrink wrapped. It was just in an envelope and the disk was sliding out in the box it was shipped in. Luckily it was not damaged but certainly could have been.

Mark and his team created the missing link of Data Management: a comprehensive industry glossary of data management terms for data professionals. My personal copy is full of notes, I'm clarifying my strategy documents, and I'm telling my coworkers "Get this. Get this now." Nice job!

Book Review--DAMA data management dictionary (July 2010 Oil IT Journal - [...])

Data Management Association's Dictionary disappoints, falls short of Wikipedia.

Following our review of the Data Management Body of Knowledge (DM-BOK) last month, we ordered the companion volume--the Dictionary1, sold as a CD Rom containing a single PDF file. We were curious to see if this work would be the Linnaean classification of data management that we have been looking for--and, more prosaically, how its definitions stack up with Wikipedia. First impression is that it is rather a lightweight production, the 850 definitions occupy 140 pages of rather spaced-out text, probably not more than a 30,000 word count in the whole dictionary.

In the introduction, the authors note--and we can only concur, that the industry is `in great need of clarity in its terminology.' They further observe that `While experts may never reach 100% agreement, we believe there is general agreement with these definitions across the data management profession.' Well that would be nice if it were true, but one of Wikipedia's strengths is the way it captures enlightening differences of opinion.

So what's it worth? The definition for `online analytical processing' is `The use of multi-dimensional databases and/or analytical tools to support the analysis of business trends and development of business projections.' This is OK as far as it goes--but it lacks narrative. It fails to explain the relationship between a normalized data base's poor query performance. Wikipedia hits the nail on the head in its first sentence viz., `an approach to swiftly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries.'

How about `master data?' This is `synonymous with reference data' and is `data that provides the context for transactional data including details of internal and external objects involved in business transactions.' That is OK but not much use outside of the business/financial services environment of DAMA.

The synonym, `reference data' curiously has a slightly different definition `data used to categorize other data, or for relating data to information beyond the boundaries of the enterprise--see master data.'

Semantic `has to do with meaning, usually of words and/or symbols' while a semantic data model (synonymous with an ontology) is `a [..] data model for non-tabular data [that] makes meaning explicit so that a human or software agent can reason about it.' Another lexical run-around occurs when you check out ontology--`a semantic data model [as above]' and `a synonym for schema.'

I am afraid that the DAMA Dictionary's usefulness is rather limited. It might be useful for looking up the odd acronym or checking out a business-oriented definition of a term? But Wikipedia beats it hands down for depth and, we believe, authority. Wikipedia, unlike the Dictionary's CD-ROM/PDF format is also more likely to be to hand when you need it.